7

Academic Vocabulary
Averil Coxhead

Introduction
Research investigating academic vocabulary has been largely driven by the needs of English
as a second or foreign language learners preparing to study in English in higher educa-
tion contexts. This field of research is growing rapidly along with English for Academic
Purposes (EAP). Academic vocabulary sits between “conversational words” and “subject-
specific words” in Beck, McKeown, & Kucan’s (2013) well-known three-tiered model of
vocabulary. In this chapter, we will look at critical topics relating to academic vocabulary
and consider options for future research.

Critical Issues and Topics

This section looks at several key issues and topics relating to academic vocabulary in
research, beginning with a short section on why academic vocabulary is important. The next
topic looks at definitions of academic vocabulary, followed by the identification of single
words as academic vocabulary and then academic multiword units such as collocations,
lexical bundles, and formulas in written academic texts. The nature of vocabulary in spoken
academic texts is the focus of the following section. Academic spoken vocabulary is a fairly
new area of research. It is followed by a short discussion of academic vocabulary in second-
ary school/middle school contexts. The final topic is academic vocabulary in learning and
teaching programs.

Why Is Academic Vocabulary Important?

Research suggests that academic vocabulary is important for several reasons. Firstly, it is a
key element of written academic texts. Word list research has found that academic vocabulary
can represent anywhere from 10% (Coxhead, 2000) to 14% (Gardner & Davies, 2014) of the
words in such texts. These figures suggest that one word in ten or one word in seven in a line
of written academic text might be an academic word. Academic study in English-medium
institutions requires a large amount of reading, and vocabulary load research suggests that

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students need to know a substantial number of words to cope with understanding academic
texts. According to Nation (2006), learners need 8,000 to 9,000 word families plus proper
nouns to reach 98% coverage of academic written texts. This level of lexical coverage has
been found to be sufficient to understand written text (Hu & Nation, 2000; Schmitt, Jiang,
& Grabe, 2011). Academic spoken texts also require substantial vocabulary knowledge.
Students need to know 4,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach
95% coverage of lectures, and up to 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal
words to reach 98% coverage (Dang & Webb, 2014). Research suggests that lexical coverage
of 95% is sufficient to understand spoken discourse (van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013). How-
ever, increased coverage is likely to increase the number of listeners who can adequately
understand speech. Academic word lists are important because they might provide a shortcut
to learning the kinds of words that students may often encounter in their academic reading
and listening. For example, learning the 1,741 words of the Academic Spoken Word List
(Dang, Coxhead, & Webb, 2017) may allow learners to recognize 92% to 93% of the words
in academic speech, which is higher than the coverage they may achieve from learning the
most frequent 2,000 words of general vocabulary (91%).
Vocabulary testing research suggests that many second language learners of English have
low levels of vocabulary knowledge and slow rates of vocabulary growth in a range of con-
texts, including Denmark (Henriksen & Danelund, 2015) and Taiwan (Webb & Chang, 2012).
Learners studying in English-medium institutions need help with vocabulary in general, and
they need more help with academic vocabulary in particular because academic vocabulary
is found in higher proportions in academic texts than in other kinds of texts, which is an
indication of specialization. For example, academic lexis does not occur with the same fre-
quency in general English texts such as fiction (Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014) and
newspapers (Gardner & Davies, 2014) as it does in academic texts. Another important point
is that understanding academic texts may be challenging for certain groups of learners. Max-
well (2013) puts this point succinctly by writing, “Nobody is a native speaker of Academic
English”. Corson (1995) points out that the social background of learners may have an impact
on exposure to academic vocabulary. He coined the term “lexical bar”, and explains that it

represents a gulf between the everyday meaning systems and the high status meaning
systems created by the introduction of an academic culture of literacy. This is a barrier
that everyone has to cross at some stage in their lives, if they are to become “successful
candidates” in the “conventional forms of education”.
(Corson, 1995, pp. 180–181)

Coxhead (2000) found that over 80% of her Academic Word List had Greek and Latin roots.
It almost goes without saying that learners with �rst language backgrounds or knowledge of
Romance languages will have an advantage over learners who come from languages which
do not draw on Graeco-Latin vocabulary. This means learners need to know about word
parts in academic vocabulary. See Sasao and Webb (2017) and Sasao (this volume) for more
information on word parts and testing this aspect of vocabulary knowledge.
Vocabulary is an important element of university discourse, as Basturkmen and Shack-
leford (2015) found in their study of first-year accountancy lectures at a university in New
Zealand. Explaining and talking about vocabulary was the most frequent language-related
episode that occurred among participants in that study. This focus on vocabulary can be seen
throughout many areas of teaching and learning in English for Academic Purposes, which
demonstrates that there is raised awareness of academic vocabulary in pedagogy as well as

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research. Academic word lists, for example, can be found as integrated sections of English
for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs in many places in the world. They can also be found
in learner dictionaries, on websites, in learning materials, and vocabulary tests (see Nation,
2016). A practical tool like an academic word list can be immediately useful as a guide for
deciding which words to focus on in EAP classes or for independent learning (see Dang,
this volume for more on word lists; see also Nation, 2016). Recent research into academic
vocabulary research has ranged from large-scale corpus-based studies of written academic
vocabulary such as Gardner and Davies (2014) and Browne, Culligan, and Phillips (2013);
spoken academic vocabulary (Dang et al., 2017); middle school vocabulary (Greene & Cox-
head, 2015); and specialized vocabulary in areas such as discipline-specific vocabulary, for
example, business studies (Nelson, n.d.), chemistry (Valipouri & Nassaji, 2013), medicine
(Wang, Liang, & Ge, 2008), and chemistry and engineering (Ward, 2009) (see Liu & Lei, this
volume for more on technical vocabulary; see also Coxhead, 2018). Academic vocabulary is
also a part of corpus-based websites that allow learners and teachers to investigate academic
vocabulary in use, for example, the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA) (available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) includes academic word lists
from which it was derived, and these are now readily available online.

Defining Academic Vocabulary

An important discussion point about academic vocabulary is how it is defined, because
definitions drive how it is identified in research. There is a dilemma here (Hyland, 2016), as
there are multiple perspectives on academic vocabulary. One way to think about academic
vocabulary is that it fits between general vocabulary and technical vocabulary. Indeed,
the organization of this volume situates this chapter on academic vocabulary between a
chapter on high-, mid-, and low-frequency words and technical vocabulary. This middle
ground approach, in turn, identifies academic vocabulary as “items which are widespread
in academic discourse, but not very frequent in general English ([for example] establish,
evidence)” (Charles & Pecorari, 2016, p. 110). In English for Academic Purposes, this
approach is termed “English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP)”. In the EGAP
approach, as Hyland (2016, p. 18) points out, “teachers attempt to isolate the skills, lan-
guage forms, and study activities thought to be common to all disciplines”. Examples of
general academic word lists include Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL), Gard-
ner & Davies (2014) Academic Vocabulary List, Browne et al.’s (2013) New Academic
Word List, and Dang et al.’s (2017) Spoken Academic Word List. The main idea of these
studies was to identify academic vocabulary which all learners in EAP will encounter in
their academic texts, no matter what subject area they are studying (Coxhead, 2000; Charles
& Pecorari, 2016). A feature of general academic vocabulary, according to Coxhead (2000,
p. 124) is that, “Academic words (e.g., substitute, underlie, establish, inherent) are not
highly salient in academic texts, as they are supportive of but not central to the topics of the
texts in which they occur”.
Gardner and Davies (2014) (see also Nation, 2016) point out that academic vocabulary is
actually spread across all frequency levels in English from high- to mid- to low-frequency
words. This definition means that words can be academic vocabulary in some contexts and
general vocabulary in others, depending on the discipline or context. An example of such
vocabulary is area, which is used in everyday English and in mathematics. Some studies
have focused on the usefulness of general academic lists in particular subject areas, such as
the Academic Word List in agriculture texts (9.06% coverage) (Martínez, Beck, & Panza,

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2009) and applied linguistics texts (11.17% coverage) (Vongpumivitch, Huang, & Chang,
2009). For a synthesis of such studies, see Coxhead (2011, 2016).
English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) is based on research into specific
domains of study, which Hyland (2016, p. 19) argues is preferable to general academic
English because, “In many situations, . . . EAP is most successful when it is tailored to meet
the needs of the specific circumstances of the students”. Hyland & Tse (2007) and Dur-
rant (2014) argue against general academic word lists on the grounds that the needs of all
EAP students cannot be met by one such list. Durrant (2016) has picked up this same issue
with Gardner and Davies’ (2014) AVL, drawing on corpora of student writing. See Gardner
and Davies (2016) for a response to that article. Hyland and Tse (2007) provide analysis
and examples of discipline-specific academic vocabulary meanings and use to make their
case against general academic vocabulary. One example is issue, which occurs fairly evenly
across science, engineering, and social science with the meaning of topic, but with lower lev-
els of occurrence across the disciplines with the meaning flow out. Wang and Nation (2004)
investigated homography in Coxhead’s AWL and found that if the homographs they found
in the list were separated, all but three word families would still meet the selection criteria
for the AWL. These words are intelligence, panel, and offset. Specialized word lists such as
Valipouri and Nassaji (2013) in chemistry, and Ward’s (2009) basic engineering word list,
are examples of subject-driven identification of specialized academic vocabulary. Another
approach to ESAP vocabulary is to look at a wider discipline such as science, and develop a
word list that identifies lexis that occurs across subjects in that area, as Coxhead and Hirsh’s
(2007) Science Word List does. This approach adds a layer of specialization for EAP stu-
dents who might take a range of science-based courses in their first year of university and
then choose to continue their studies in a particular area such as biology or chemistry. For
more on technical vocabulary, see the chapter by Liu and Lei in this volume.
Nation, Coxhead, Chung, and Quero (2016, p. 150) suggest that the general vs. discipline-
specific debate needs a compromise, arguing that “Working on the core meaning and uses of
an academic word enables rather than disables current or later learning in more discipline-
specific texts”. Hyland (2016, p. 17) also suggests some common ground by envisaging
academic vocabulary as being in “a continuum rather than a dichotomy”. Moreover, Dang
et al. (2017) point out that both approaches to identifying academic vocabulary practically
ignore the fact that EAP learners are not one homogenous group; they have different levels
of vocabulary knowledge. This suggests that academic words that are useful for one learner
may not necessarily be useful for another.

Identifying Single Words as Academic Vocabulary

Early studies focused on identifying academic vocabulary relied on hand counts of lexis in
contexts such as student annotations on textbooks, for example Lynn (1973) and Ghadessy
(1979). As technology has developed in the last few decades, more recent studies of aca-
demic vocabulary have adopted a corpus-based approach. In this section, we will look at
different ways to identify academic words in corpora, including common core, corpus com-
parison, and keyword methodologies, drawing on examples from English for Academic Pur-
poses research. The definitions of academic vocabulary above play out in the identification
of academic vocabulary in these studies because whatever definition a researcher adopts will
affect the outcome of studies which aim to identify academic vocabulary.
A common core approach is based on the idea that there is a “general pool of language
of high frequency items that predominates all uses of language” (Basturkmen, 2006, p. 16).

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A feature of the common core approach is an assumption that learners who are focused on
academic vocabulary will already have some knowledge of these high-frequency words in
English. Coxhead’s (2000) AWL is an example of a common core approach, because it used
West’s (1953) General Service List of Words (GSL) to represent high frequency words. This
approach did not take into account that some high-frequency words are also academic words
(Nation, 2016). As mentioned already, recent research on vocabulary knowledge of second
and foreign language learners of English suggests that vocabulary knowledge of high-
frequency vocabulary can be patchy, at best (see, for example, Webb & Chang, 2012; Hen-
riksen & Danelund, 2015; Coxhead & Boutorwick, 2018). Basing the AWL, for example,
on an existing general service word list means that decisions made for selecting items for
West’s (1953) GSL have an impact on the selection of items for the AWL. See Nation (2016),
Gardner & Davies (2014), and Hyland & Tse (2007), for example, for critical discussions of
the AWL. Browne et al.’s New Academic Word List (2013) is built on a new general service
list, developed by the same researchers, and is another example of a common core approach
to academic vocabulary.
Other examples of common core approaches to academic vocabulary include Coxhead &
Hirsh’s (2007) Science Word List. The focus of this research was lexical items that occurred
outside West’s General Service List (GSL) (1953) and Coxhead’s (2000) AWL, and met
selection principles from an analysis of a corpus of study guides, laboratory manuals, and
textbook chapters from first year university courses in 14 subjects in the sciences.
A corpus comparison approach uses two corpora: a specialized academic corpus and (usu-
ally) a general English corpus. This approach allows investigators to identify words which
occur more frequently in academic English than in general English. Gardner and Davies
(2014) developed the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) using corpus comparison. This list
is based on lemmas rather than word families (see Dang’s chapter, this volume, for more
on units of counting in word list development). The academic corpus used by Gardner and
Davies (2014) is the 120-million-word academic subsection of the Corpus of Contemporary
American English (COCA). This subsection contains nine disciplines, including business
and finance; education; humanities; history; law and political science; medicine and health;
philosophy, religion, psychology; science and technology; and social science. The academic
corpus is made up of journal articles, newspapers, and magazines, and the non-academic
corpus contains texts such as magazines and fiction. Table 7.1 shows the top 50 items in the
Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014).
Nation (2016) highlights a problem with this corpus comparison for academic vocabu-
lary by Gardner and Davies (2014), which is that words such as history, low, and both are
included in the list. While the methodology which was used might well select such items,
they do not seem to be especially academic in nature.
Identifying academic words by their keyness is also a corpus comparison approach.
Keyness studies focus on word frequencies in different corpora, and higher frequency in a
specialized corpus is seen as a marker of academic vocabulary. Paquot (2010) developed
an Academic Keyword List (AKL) using two academic written corpora (professional writ-
ing and student writing by native speakers of English). She drew on principles of key-
ness, range, and distribution of vocabulary. The AKL includes single and multiword items,
and includes high-frequency vocabulary. Some AKL examples are according to, relation
to, second, scope, requirement, and late. The AKL can be found at www.uclouvain.be/
en-372126.html.
Studies into single academic words illustrate the importance of this lexis. Let’s turn now
to academic multiword units.

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Table 7.1 Top 50 items of the Academic Vocabulary List

Items 1–25 Part of speech Items 26–50 Part of speech

study n history n
group n develop v
system n suggest v
social j economic j
provide v low j
however r relationship n
research n both r
level n value n
result n require v
include v role n
important j difference n
process n analysis n
use n practice n
development n society n
data n thus r
information n control n
effect n form n
change n report v
table n rate n
policy n significant j
university n figure n
model n factor n
experience n interest n
activity n culture n
human j need n

Note: The parts of speech noted in Table 7.1 are n = noun, v = verb, j = adjective, and r = adverb.

Source: Gardner and Davies, 2014, p. 317

Identifying Academic Multiword Units

This section begins with the smallest multiword unit, academic collocations (made up of two
words), and then moves on to lexical bundles and academic formulas which contain three
or more words in strings. Several studies have investigated two-word combinations with a
statistical relationship in academic corpora. Coxhead and Byrd (2012) report on patterns in
collocations of items from the AWL. They find examples of AWL words occurring in noun
phrases which are long and fairly complex, a feature of academic written texts noted by
Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999; see also Biber, 2006). They also find
AWL words that occur together, as in analysis and assessment and analysis and interpreta-
tion. Coxhead and Byrd (2012) analyzed the collocations of the AWL word concept and
found two main uses. One involved the description and evaluation of a concept (for example,
basic, central, dangerous, and different) and the second type referred to the origin of the
concept or its specific area of use (as in economic, ideological, legal, and Anglo-American)
(p. 13). Another example is assessment, whereby collocates before the word provide infor-
mation about types of assessment (e.g., brief; appropriate) and collocates after the word

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provide some sort of characterization of the item which is being assessed (e.g., assessment
of success; assessment of change) (Byrd & Coxhead, 2012, p. 12).
Durrant’s (2009) study of academic collocations involved a 25-million-word academic
written corpus that contained the following disciplines: arts and humanities; engineering;
law and education; medicine and health sciences; science; and social sciences. He used a
keyword analysis to compare the occurrences of collocations in the academic corpus with a
non-academic corpus. Durrant (2009) identified 1,000 collocations, and found that 763 of
them were grammatical, in that they contained one non-lexical word (for example, assume
that, associated with, and based on). This finding is a reminder of the importance of high-
frequency vocabulary in academic texts (actually, in all texts, see Dang et al., 2017), and
highlights the problem with the exclusion of high frequency words in Coxhead’s AWL (Dur-
rant, 2009).
Another study of academic collocations resulted in Ackermann and Chen’s Academic
Collocation List (ACL) (2013), which was developed using a common core approach by
analyzing the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE). PICAE contains
journal articles and textbooks from 28 disciplines and contains over 25 million running
words. PICAE has four disciplines: applied sciences and professions, humanities, social
sciences, and natural/formal sciences. The collocations were identified in the corpus using
a computer program, and the data was then refined using expert ratings until the final list
of 2,468 items was reached (downloadable from http://pearsonpte.com/research/academic-
collocation-list/). Ackermann and Chen (2013) categorized their Academic Collocation List
according to grammatical patterns. Almost three-quarters of the Academic Collocations List
were in a noun combination category (for example, assessment process and classic example).
The studies highlighted here illustrate that corpus-based studies into academic colloca-
tions result in a great deal of data, and it is no mean feat to work through the data sets to
decide what might be worth investigating further, what meets selection criteria, and what
might be the most useful items for teachers and learners. Note that both studies which have
been discussed here present large numbers of academic collocations which would be quite
daunting to take into English for Academic Purposes classrooms.
Moving beyond two-word combinations takes us to lexical bundles, which are words in a
string of three or more words which occur frequently (Biber et al., 1999). Examples of lexi-
cal bundles include on the basis of, on the other hand, and at the same time. Biber, Conrad,
and Cortes (2004) found that lexical bundles in academic texts occur more often in spoken
classroom language than in textbooks or academic written prose. An explanation for this
finding is that the lexical bundles in classroom discourse are “useful for instructors who need
to organise and structure discourse which is at the same time informational, involved, and
produced with real-time production constraints” (Biber, 2006, p. 148). Biber (2006) found
more lexical bundles in natural science than in business, engineering, humanities, and social
science, which he associates with the heavier technical content of natural science.
Differences in frequency and lexical bundles in disciplines have also been noted by
Hyland (2008), Pickering and Byrd (2008), and Byrd and Coxhead (2010). Like Biber, Con-
rad, and Cortes (2004), Pickering and Byrd (2008) found more lexical bundles in spoken
than written academic texts. Byrd and Coxhead (2010) found that arts, commerce, law and
science shared 73 four-word lexical bundles. One example of a shared bundle is on the other
hand. It had a total frequency of 353 in Coxhead’s academic written corpus from the AWL
study, and occurred most often in the law subsection of the corpus (35%), followed by com-
merce (27%), arts (27%), and then science (15%). Law contained the highest number of
lexical bundles at 5.44%, followed by commerce at 2.65%. Arts and science both had lower

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levels of lexical bundles at around 1.45%. Hyland (2008) also found low levels of lexical
bundles in applied linguistics.
Another study of multiword units containing strings of more than three words was car-
ried out by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010), who were in search of pedagogically useful
academic formulas. Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) used a quantitative analysis of corpora
to identify academic formulas (the Academic Formulas List – AFL) in academic written
English and academic spoken English, drawing on statistical analyses and comparisons with
non-academic written and spoken corpora. They then asked experienced language teachers
and language testers to rate a sample of formulas based on whether they were a formulaic
expression, were cohesive, and worth teaching. Three lists were developed from this pro-
cess. One list is the core AFL list, which contains both written and spoken formulas (for
example, in terms of, at the same time, from the point of view, in order to, and as well as).
The second list contains 200 spoken academic formulas (for example, be able to, blah blah
blah, this is the, you know what I mean, and you can see), and the third list contains 200
written academic formulas (for example, even though the, a wide range of, was based on,
take into account the, and as can be seen). The formulas were also categorized according to
their functions in texts, such as ability and possibility (allows us to; are able to) and evalu-
ation (an important role in; is consistent with). Note that the formulas are made up of high
frequency words in strings. This point is important when we think about the nature of aca-
demic vocabulary and multiword units: high frequency and non-content words predominate
in these patterns (Durrant, 2009).
A more wide-ranging study of academic multiword units comes from Liu (2012) who
investigated the occurrences of lexical bundles, phrasal verbs, and idioms, drawing from
studies such as Biber et al. (1999), Carter and McCarthy (2006), Simpson-Vlach and Ellis
(2010), Gardner and Davies (2007), and also from dictionaries. Liu (2012) used the academic
sections of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National
Corpus to look for these multiword units in the corpora and he ranked the resulting list of 228
frequent multiword units into three frequency bands. The first band has 77 units which occur
100 times or more in the corpora; the second bank contains 85 units which occur between
50 and 99 times in the corpora, and the final band contains 67 units which occurred between
20 and 49 times. Some examples from the first band include according to (det + N), as well
as (det + N), and NP suggest that.
All of these studies into multiword units in academic written English suggest that there
are many such units, in many patterns. Byrd and Coxhead (2007) point out that bringing such
patterns into classrooms can be quite tricky, and learners tend to use fewer lexical bundles
in their academic writing than professional writers (see Cortes, 2004).

Academic Vocabulary in Spoken Academic English

Spoken academic vocabulary in English is a much less-researched topic than written aca-
demic vocabulary. Until the advent of large scale academic spoken corpora, such as the
British Academic Spoken Corpus (BASE) (see Thompson & Nesi, 2001) and the Michi-
gan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (Simpson, Briggs, Ovens, & Swales,
2002), it was much more difficult and expensive to obtain spoken academic texts for analy-
sis. The lectures in the BASE and MICASE corpora have featured in an analysis of lexical
bundles in academic speaking (Nesi & Basturkmen, 2006), who focused on the cohesive
discourse in the lectures and the use of referential bundles and discourse organizers, such as
at the same time and if you want to.

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The vocabulary needed for listening to academic speech was explored in Dang and
Webb’s (2014) analysis of the BASE corpus. This study found that the most frequent 4,000-
word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 95% coverage of the corpus,
and the most frequent 8,000-word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided
98% coverage. Dang and Webb (2014) also noted that learners can reach 95% coverage
of academic spoken texts if they know the 3,000 most frequent word families in English
and Coxhead’s (2000) AWL. This study suggests that spoken academic texts require fewer
general academic words than written academic texts. Dang and Webb (2014) found that the
AWL accounted for 4% of spoken academic texts. A study by Thompson (2006) reported
that the AWL covered 4.9% of a corpus of lectures. For more on academic vocabulary and
listening to lectures, see Rodgers and Webb (2016).
Research has also looked into the vocabulary of listening assessments. Webb and Parib-
akht (2015) analyzed texts used in a Canadian university admission test called CanTEST and
found that the most frequent 4,000-word families covered 95% of these texts but that the
most frequent 10,000-word families were needed to reach 98% coverage. In another study,
Paribakht and Webb (2016) found variation of AWL coverage of reading and listening pas-
sages in a university admission test, with higher coverage in reading (6.31%) than listening.
A more recent study by Dang, Coxhead, and Webb (2017) on vocabulary in academic
spoken texts has resulted in an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) of 1,741-word fami-
lies. The ASWL was developed from a corpus of 13 million running words from lectures,
seminars, labs, and tutorials. This word list took a core academic vocabulary approach and
as well as corpus-based measures, and it included teacher and student-based data. A key
feature of the ASWL is it can be adapted according to the vocabulary knowledge of different
learners. Dang et al. (2017) found that knowledge of ASWL can help learners reach between
92% and 96% coverage of academic spoken English.

Academic Vocabulary in Secondary School/Middle School Contexts

Much research on academic vocabulary has been situated in higher education contexts, and
yet it is also important to secondary school or middle school education (Crossman & Pinch-
beck, 2012; Greene & Coxhead, 2015; Roessingh, 2016). One study that looks into academic
vocabulary in middle school textbooks in the US is based on Jennifer Greene’s 18 million
running word middle school corpus of 109 textbooks from grades 6 to 8 in the subjects
English grammar and writing, health, mathematics, science, and social sciences and history
(Greene & Coxhead, 2015). West’s GSL (1953) accounted for nearly 80% of the words in the
corpus, and Coxhead’s AWL covers nearly 5.4%. The middle school vocabulary lists from
each of the five subject areas contained items which only occurred outside the GSL. Selec-
tion criteria for the middle school lists include frequency and range from within each subject
area, leading to words in the science list such as energy, organism, element, and react; and
equation, graph, fraction, and data in the mathematics list. Each middle school vocabulary
list contains between 600 to 800 word types, and coverage of their respective subject-based
corpora range from the lowest at 5.83% in social studies and history through to 10.17% in
science (Greene & Coxhead, 2015, p. 23).
Several studies have looked into coverage of Coxhead’s AWL (2000) in secondary school
texts. Roessingh (2016) found higher proportions of the AWL in expository texts (9.86%)
than literary texts (5.5%). In a study of academic vocabulary in the teacher talk of three
teachers (maths, science, and English as an additional language) in an international school in
Germany for grade 6 students (aged 10–11 years), Coxhead (2017) found that the coverage

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of the AWL on average was 1.92%. This figure is around half the coverage reported by Dang
and Webb (2014) of the AWL in university-level spoken texts. The percentage of AWL words
in the teacher talk increased in all three subjects over the course of a year, from around 1%
in each subject to 2.05% in science, 2.45% in English as an additional language, and 2.78% in
mathematics. Coxhead, Stevens, and Tinkle (2010) examined the occurrence of Coxhead’s
AWL in a corpus of secondary school science textbooks and found the list covered 7.05%.
This coverage was 2% lower than the AWL coverage in the science subcorpus from the
original AWL study which was made up of university-level texts. Coxhead et al. (2010)
also investigated the coverage of Coxhead and Hirsh’s (2007) Science Word List (317 word
families) and found that it covered 5.90% of their corpus of secondary school science text-
books, which is higher than the coverage reported by Coxhead and Hirsh in university-level
science texts (3.79%). These figures suggest that the Science Word List is potentially more
useful for secondary school learners than students preparing for university studies. For more
on coverage of the Science Word List in specialized texts, see Coxhead and Quero (2015).

Academic Vocabulary in Learning Programs

The final topic in this section concerns research into academic vocabulary in programs of
study. There is a growing interest in this research, because identifying academic vocabulary
to support EAP learners and their teachers is one thing, but putting the results of such studies
into practice and evaluating the effectiveness of approaches to teaching and learning is quite
another. Storch and Tapper (2009) report on increased and appropriate use of AWL words
in EAP student writing over time in an Australian context, while Crossman and Pinchbeck
(2012) report on increased sophistication in academic vocabulary use in writing by seven
Generation 1.5 learners in a university preparation course in Canada. Luxton, Fry, and Cox-
head (2017) report on gains in academic vocabulary knowledge over a six-month period.
Their study involved 2,642 students in 35 secondary schools in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and
was based on responses on the academic section of Schmitt, Schmitt, and Clapham’s (2001)
Vocabulary Levels Test. The participants were roughly divided between monolingual speak-
ers of English and bilingual/and or multilingual English-language speakers, and participants
studied a range of subjects in secondary school, including English literature, English as a
second language, physical education, religious education, technology, and science. Teach-
ers were provided with suggestions for focusing on academic vocabulary development in
classes and were supported in their attempts to focus on this lexis. Statistically significant
gains in test results were reported by Pasifka students, Māori-medium (kura kaupapa) stu-
dents, students who spoke languages other than English at home, second language speakers
of English who had spent between three to five years in New Zealand, and those who had
attended English language support classes. Luxton et al. (2017, p. 14) also found high cover-
age figures (19%) for Coxhead’s AWL in assessment texts at the secondary school level. The
importance of academic vocabulary in assessment texts was highlighted in interviews with
secondary school teachers (Coxhead, 2018).
There is value in finding out more about how learners develop their understanding and use
of academic multiword units. Jones and Haywood (2004) reported on an attempt to include
80 lexical bundles (such as there were no significant differences and studies have shown that)
selected from work by Biber et al. (1999) into EAP coursework, and to measure student use
of these multiword units in their writing. Jones and Haywood (2004) found that the classroom
activities helped raise the learners’ awareness of the lexical bundles, but this awareness was not
accompanied by much evidence of actual use in writing. Another example of such research is

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Li and Schmitt’s (2009) study of a Chinese first language MA student’s use of multiword units
(lexical phrases) in writing over an academic year in a British university.

Future Directions
This chapter has demonstrated that while there is a growing literature on academic vocabu-
lary, the majority of this research has focused on the identification of this lexis. Moreover,
these studies have tended to employ a range of corpus-based methodologies and predomi-
nantly target undergraduate-level education. More research is needed to examine academic
vocabulary in secondary school and postgraduate education in different contexts, and draw
on both written and spoken data. Both single-word and multiword unit analyses are needed
for these contexts. It is also important that corpus-based research is complemented by quali-
tative approaches, as can be seen in the work by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) and Dang
et al. (2017). More studies are also needed into academic spoken events other than lectures.
There is also a need to find out more about how academic vocabulary is learned and how
this vocabulary develops over time.
Another important area for future research is replication studies. Miller and Biber (2015)
examine approaches to validation of word lists, including academic word lists, and draw
attention to the need to find out more about how different corpora can have an impact on
the selection of items and whether the same results would or could be found using different
corpora. Replication is also important in academic vocabulary learning and teaching studies.
Another direction for future research is to investigate the extent to which academic vocab-
ulary occurs in languages other than English. A couple of studies are already underway in this
area, including, for example, Danish at the University of Copenhagen by Anne Sofie Jakobsen
(see Jakobsen, Coxhead, & Henriksen, 2018) and Welsh as part of the CorCenCC (Corpws
Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes – The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) project, led
by Dr. Dawn Knight at Cardiff University (go to www.corcencc.org/). The predominance of
research in this chapter is based on English for Academic Purposes, but this work needs to be
balanced by ground-breaking research in other languages and in different levels of education.

Further Reading
Hyland, K., & Shaw, P. (Eds.). Routledge handbook of English for Academic Purposes. London:
Routledge.
This volume contains chapters which relate to or directly discuss aspects of academic vocabulary.
Nation, I. S. P. (2016). Making and using word lists for language learning and testing. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
This book contains a chapter on specialized vocabulary and word lists.
Coxhead, A. (2018). Vocabulary and English for specific purposes research: Quantitative and qualita-
tive perspectives. London: Routledge.
This book has chapters on academic vocabulary in secondary school contexts and university in
English-medium contexts.

Related Topics
Classifying and identifying formulaic language; frequency as a guide for vocabulary usefulness;
high-, mid-, and low-frequency words; technical vocabulary; word list; and key issues in researching
multiword items

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Averil Coxhead

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